Morrisons promotes Trevor Strain to finance chief

Strain will succeed Pennycook next spring and join the main board in June 2013. He joined Morrisons in 2009 as commercial and operations finance director and was promoted to finance director corporate in June 2011. Finance, audit and IT will be among his new responsibilities.

He was previously with Tesco for seven years where he was UK property finance director and then UK planning and reporting finance director.

Morrisons has also poached new group trading director Casper Meijer from Dutch supermarket Albert Heijn.

Meijer was executive vice-president for merchandising at the Dutch retailer and had responsibilities for both supermarkets and convenience stores, an area Morrisons is looking to grow significantly with the roll-out of its M Local stores.

He joins the grocer at the end of the first quarter and Martyn Jones will continue as interim group commercial director until the role has been handed over. Jones has been performing the role since commercial director Richard Hodgson left last month.

Morrisons chief executive Dalton Philips said: “I’ve worked closely with Trevor for three years and I’m confident that he has the qualities and experience to make an excellent group finance director, and that he will build further on Richard Pennycook’s legacy of a prudent approach to financial management, transparent reporting and open shareholder engagement.”

He added: “I am really pleased that Casper is joining Morrisons. His broad retail experience, and in particular his record and passion for offering customers fresh food at affordable prices is a great fit with Morrisons. He is well placed to help drive our trading strategy as we roll out our fresh format stores and expand into new channels including convenience.”

Independent retail analyst Nick Bubb said: “The market will be pleased that the uncertainty about who would replace Richard is over, but disappointed that a better-known external candidate did not get the job.”